Siege is a form of war once more in the headlines with the conflict in the Middle East. The Syrian city of Aleppo was split in two for four years from 2012 to 2016, each half besieged by the forces of the other sideâthe regime of Bashar al-Asaad (backed by Iran and Russia) and the diverse coalition that emerged from the âArab Springâ and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. As this book goes to press that siege has ended amid a welter of accusations by each party that the other targeted innocent civilians. The world watched the harrowing spectacle of starving and traumatised people trying to escape the ruins of eastern Aleppo into the care of the United Nations without retribution (so far) against those who had targeted them. The desolation they left behind was not just human suffering, but also the destruction of one of the most important medieval Arabic cities, its monuments, mosques and churches in ruins. Other sieges have marred the war-torn landscape of Iraq as well as Syria (Homs, Mosul)âa reminder that for all the destructiveness of modern firepower, sieges (often of considerable duration) remain integral to warfare as they have been throughout the ages.
Not only are sieges and the fate of civilians caught up in them immemorial, but they have shaped the imagination as well as the experience of war. The founding epic of Western literature, Homerâs Iliad, recounts several months near the end of a ten-year siege that concluded with the sack of Troy as the inhabitants, with few exceptions, were enslaved or put to the sword and the city pillaged and burned. Among those who escaped was Aeneas, bearing his aged father Anchises, who according to Virgilâs Aeneid (looking back at the fall of Troy from the first century BCE) went on to found Rome, a city that also had its own litany of sieges. Sieges, in short, and the fate of the inhabitants who are caught up in them and suffer their consequences, have in the Western tradition at least occupied a central place in the art and literature as well as the annals of war.
The strictly military reasons for the perennity and importance of sieges seem fairly clear. Ever since warriors fortified strongholds that could threaten enemy forces in the field and ever since urban centres developed as the locus of economic and political power, both became logical targets of attack. Quite apart from the fact that taking major centres was often the goal of a campaign, making their defence a priority, the use of strongholds to control extensive tracts of territory or to provide refuge to forces under pressure gave sieges a broad strategic importance. 1 Because the defence of such strongholds was static, however, attacks on them produced a type of warfare that stood out, and continues to stand out, from the manoeuvre of armies in the field or from the harassment of guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency against an extended population. 2 Concentration in space and the polarisation of attack and defence mark out the siege.
Further characteristics emerge under closer scrutiny. One is the distinction between direct and indirect attack on the part of those laying the siege. Direct assault is the quickest means of reducing a stronghold. But the strength of the latterâs defence and the quantity of its supplies (or its capacity to be resupplied) help determine the balance of advantage between the two parties. The indirect means of starving the enemy out may prove a more effective form of attack in the longer termâor at any rate the prerequisite for a successful assault. To these two means of attack one should add the no less classic weapon of treachery and trickery in order to weaken morale, provoke internal division or lead the defenders into fatal missteps. A wooden horse, after all, was the undoing of Troy. Yet, it is by no means certain that the ultimate advantage lies with the besieger rather than the besieged. The former requires more soldiers than the latter, since the point of defensive works is to economise manpower, and the larger forces deployed by the besieger cannot then be used elsewhere. In the end, besieging forces may be seen off by the strength of the defence or besieged in turn by relieving forces. As in other forms of warfare, there lies a third option between victory and defeatânegotiated surrender.
The special place of civilians in sieges compared to other kinds of warfare is self-evident with towns and cities, which by definition contain large non-military populations. But in the case of forts and castles, inhabitants of surrounding areas may well seek protection and thus become caught up in a siege. By its very nature, siege warfare exposes civilians to the risk of particular forms of violenceâsuch as bombardment, hunger, disease, assault, rape, slavery, pillage, destruction of homes and buildings and the desecration of cultural and religious sites. Other types of combat may result in some or all of these. But sieges place civilians at the heart of battle more consistently and in greater numbers than other kinds of warfareâat least until the onset of bombing from the air or the emergence of modern genocides.
It is this prominence of non-combatants in siege warfare (or at any rate of those with no official status as warriors) that we propose to study in this volume. Recently, historians of different eras have devoted a good deal of attention to the effects of military violence on civilians, including urban populations. 3 Yet there has been little recognition of siege warfare as a discrete type of military engagement that makes civilians especially vulnerable, and therefore of the questions that stem from this. Collectively, the authors of the chapters presented here contend that the importance of sieges extends far beyond their tactical and strategic value for armies in the field. Sieges have been the sites where the relationships between civilians and war have been defined to their fullest extent. The book therefore raises questions about the roles of civilians during siegesâas victims, particularly during the bloody massacres in which sieges often end, and as active participants through their attempts to support or undermine military forces. It also asks about the codification of laws and customs of siege warfare; daily interactions between soldiers and civilians; the broader symbolic meanings of sieges for the wars of which they form a part; their place in historical memory; and the ways in which civilian survivors have dealt with siege trauma. In addressing these issues, the book suggests that long before the âtotal warsâ of the twentieth century, sieges eroded the distinctions between the civilian and military worlds, and ensured that non-combatants were both victims and participants of conflicts.
In order to pose these questions and to begin to address the gap in our knowledge about civilians under siege, the book adopts a distinctive, regressive method. As with any historical inquiry, there is a danger in assuming evolutionary logic with the attendant risk of teleology (post hoc ergo propter hocâsubsequent, therefore consequent). The dangers are all the greater when the subject in question is one which, while precise (the fate of civilians), relates to a phenomenon that has occurred with varying dimensions in different historical contexts and with such fluctuating importance throughout history. By working in reverse order from the siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, for four years from 1992â1995, during which civilians with scant protection lived under artillery fire from the Bosnian Serb forces in the surrounding mountains, to the siege of Troy in the second millennium BCE, which was rooted in historical reality but assumed mythological status in the literature of classical Greece, any idea of causal relationships is disrupted. Instead, we gain a set of studies, each one of which poses fresh issues precisely because its place in the sequence is not consequential and all of which invite comparison with each other. The intention is to generate questions and identify arguments about civilian experience that pay due regard to the differences in form and importance taken by siege warfare across history.
Those differences call for brief comment. If sieges figured in classical Greece, they were the dominant form of warfare from the late Roman to the high medieval periods and again in the early modern period, as the offensive capacity of the gunpowder revolution met its answer in the new âartillery fortressesâ pioneered in early sixteenth-century Italy. These culminated in Vaubanâs forts on the expanded eastern frontier of Louis XIVâs France in the late seventeenth century. 4 Larger field armies in the eighteenth century and the anticipation of the ânation in armsâ during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars swung the pendulum back to the war of movement. Yet the nineteenth century saw a continued duel between improved fortress design and more destructive firepower, giving rise to important sieges not only in Europe (Sebastopol in the Crimean War in 1854â1855, Paris in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Edirne/Adrianople in the First Balkan War in 1912â1913, PrzemyĆl in Galicia in 1914â1915, at the start of the First World War) but also in America (Richmond, Vicksburg and Atlanta in the American Civil War).
The limits of space and our own knowledge have led us to focus on the âWestern way of warâ, but we are acutely aware that sieges also played a role in warfare outside Europe. Chap. 8 by Alan Murray on the siege of Jerusalem in 1099 and Chap. 5 by Fergus Robson on the French and British expeditions to Egypt and Palestine at the turn of the nineteenth century allow us to look at how Westerners treated civilians in sieges in two non-Western settings. But this theme becomes even more significant during the zenith of Western colonialism. From Delhi and Lucknow during the Indian âmutinyâ in 1857 to the siege of General Gordon in Khartoum in 1881â1882 (and the subsequent reduction of the Sudan by Kitchener) or Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, sieges marked the irruption of European colonialism into Asia and Africa and the violent reactions by indigenous peoples against it. In 1904â1905, the Japanese dramatically stepped on stage as the first Asian power to modernise its military with a protracted siege of the Russians at Port Arthur. How âindigenousâ and Western forces treated the civilians of the other side in these colonial sieges is an important dimension of the subject that others will hopefully take up.
The twentieth century complicates the picture for reasons of scale and definition. Paris with two million inhabitants in 1870 anticipated the potential size of civilian populations caught up by siege in an urbanising world. There were three million in Leningrad in 1941â1944, including some 300,000 refugees, and up to two million in Aleppo in 2012â2016. Both these sieges still conformed to the classic definition of a strong point or defended city surrounded and mostly cut off from resupply (Leningrad famously could be supported in winter by ice roads over Lake Ladoga and there was limited aid from the air in both cases). Both were subject to starvation as well as direct assault. But air power reduced the distinction between besieged cities under fire and the civilian population of an entire region or country which could be targeted by mass bombing, as happened widely in the Second World War and Vietnam. 5
The same was true of naval blockade. This was an ancient component of siege warfare: it contributed to the fall of Calais to the English in 1346â1347 and, when deployed on a novel scale during the Napoleonic Wars, it helped isolate the continent from outside supply. Yet its implications became altogether different when applied to industrial and urban societies that relied on a global division of production and trade. The indirect dimension of siege warfareâdepriving the besieged of vital suppliesâcould now be attempted for a country or even a continent, as during the two world wars. Aerial bombardment (destroying cities from above) and continental naval blockade (starving civilians out) thus translated key features of siege warfare to civilians not under close siege and so to entire societies.
This was also the case with the siege as defensive combat. Traditionally, the cost of fortifications limited strong-points to individual fortresses or defended towns, although the accumulation of these, as in the southern Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a highly urbanised area for the pre-industrial world), might well amount to a defensive system. However, the kind of peopleâs war opened up by the French Revolution meant that field works (an ancient form of defensive warfare) could now be deployed thanks to mass armies and field artillery as an extended defensive system, amounting to a kind of siege warfare over substantial rural zones. These might even incorporate towns and prior strong-points as subordinate elements. This was partly what happened between Washington DC and Richmond during the American Civil War (the battle of Fredericksburg, the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond) though the lesson went largely unlearned in Europe. 6 It is what occurred to general surprise in Europe in 1914â1915, not just in the west, but also on the successive âfrontsâ (the term in its current sense dates from that moment) that locked Europe into a mutual siege as each side sought both to defend itself and to attack the other and also to deprive the latter of vital supplies by naval blockade and unrestricted submarine warfare. 7 In these ways, therefore, siege warfare and its effects on the civilians caught up in it have influenced warfare more generally in the contemporary age.
Overall, this book is structured around four main themes. The first concerns the definitions and limits of sieges. Certain features are common to all sieges since the latter constitute a form of positional war rather than warfare of movement and tend to focus on fixed sites of actual or symbolic power. Yet as we have noted, there is always a relationship not only to the wider campaign but also to the broader territory in which they occur. Emilie Dosquet in Chap. 6, for instance, discusses how, during Louis XIVâs wars in the late seventeenth century, sieges and positional warfare were elements of a wider strategy of âaggressive defenceâ. They were inextricably linked to partisan warfare, or âsmall warâ. In many cases, once besieged locations in the Palatinate had capitulated, the siege was inverted and spilled out into the surrounding countryside as towns became bases for French raiding partiesâwith devastating effects on unprotected civilian communities. Fergus Robson analyses similar developments in late-eighteenth-century Calabria and Puglia, where the French Revolutionary armies witnessed, and participated in, the melding of siege warfare and guerrilla warfare. Alex Dowdall in Chap. 4 shows how, during the First World War, opposed lines of trenches spread across vast tracts of Europe and, in the manner already indicated, combined with aerial bombing, long-range artillery fire, economic blockade and unrestricted submarine warfare to ensure that many Europeans experienced something of the conditions of siege warfare. Siege, in other words, is a kind of combat that even in earlier periods, and certainly more recently, extends more widely than at first might seem to be the case. We must be aware that what happens outside the defences of a pa...